Superzombies Are Nobody's Friends
by Nancy Brown
Summary: Zombies are hard to deal with. Zombies of dead superheroes are REALLY hard to deal with. Written for zombi fic ation. VirgilxRichie


Pairing: mild Virgil/Richie

Warnings: Darkfic, gore consistent with brain-eating undead, so much character death

Spoilers: None, really; ignores "Power Outage"

Beta: Dotfic kindly took a look at this and I thank her

A/N: Written for Zombi_fic_ation (on Livejournal) prompt 443. Static Shock - Virgil/Richie - they thought they might win; then Batman got infected...

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"Get down!"

Gear's voice reached him a second before the brick did, and Virgil ducked. The projectile whizzed past so close the breeze tickled his scalp. Most of the zombies never got above a constant stupid lurch, but a few were brighter, and could use tools to stun their prey.

"You okay, V?" Under his mask, Gear looked plenty worried, and Virgil gave him a tight smile.

"Didn't even leave a scratch." Which was good. Batman said the pathogen was blood-born, carried by mucus and worse. One bite, one scratch with an infected surface, and Virgil would be shambling along out there, hungry for the Cranium Special at Burger Fool.

Gear nodded. "Makes me wish for the old days when all we had to worry about was running into Bang Babies."

From their hiding position, Virgil heard a long, familiar moan. He risked a look up, and saw the drooping, decayed feathers and slack skin that used to be Talon. Her birdy feet tripped over themselves, and her eyes were sunk back into her skull, but she kept moving towards their location.

"Oh, you had to say that out loud, didn't you?" With a sigh, Virgil sent a bolt of energy at her, and almost gagged on the burning smell. The charges wouldn't kill her, not with her already kind of dead, but no feet made it harder for her to keep up. "Time to go."

As he and Gear scrambled out of their hiding spot, Virgil made the mistake of looking behind him. Talon's wings were useless, but she was trying to flap them with the dull, jerky movements of the undead, to fly after them anyway, ended up hobbling on her ruined legs and lurching into the short hops. Feathers dropped off her wings, crushed under her own contortions.

Then Gear grabbed his hand, and they ran. They didn't dare waste the flying discs or Backpack's power supplies. The power station had gone down the second day of the plague, and at the same time, most of the grid that powered the rest of the East Coast. Nights were dark, and full of death. The Justice League had gone in to help. The ones still moving were lurching, except Batman and a few who'd gone missing.

"Virge, seriously man, are you okay?" They were far enough from the group Talon had been with, and Richie had stopped.

Virgil shook his head. "No. But I'm not hurt." Just seriously freaked out.

They made their way through the empty streets back to base with the supplies they'd gone out to scavenge: cans of soup and cans of pop; some of that agar from Alva's old labs that Batman said he needed; and one thing Virgil couldn't resist picking up. They pulled off their costumes outside and stowed them because it was easier to be Virgil and Richie than explain.

"About time you two muppets got back," said Sharon, relief in her eyes even as she chided them. During the initial onset of the plague, Pops had been taken, but Virgil had saved his sister from Rubberband Zombie, poor Adam. Now she knew about his double life, and she still gave him hell, and he wouldn't have her any other way.

"'Thanks, guys, you did a really great thing going out among the zombies to get us food, I can't imagine what we would do without you,'" Richie chirped, dropping his bag of soup cans in front of her.

Sharon rolled her eyes. "The big, scary freak says you two need to get your skinny butts downstairs as soon as you get in. So go." She spun on one heel and began unpacking the cans, ignoring them.

Virgil tipped his head to Richie, and they headed to the basement. Alva's old mansion made a weird home base, but he had better security than most other people in Dakota. And the Batcave had been compromised. Batman was the last holdout of the League, of his own Gotham group of caped misfits, of the grownups Virgil had secretly believed could never be beaten by anything, much less some germ.

Batman kept his cowl on, even here. Virgil took it as a sign of faith. Sure, he knew Bats was really Bruce Wayne, super billionaire, but Richie and Sharon and the other handful of refugees they'd collected had no clue. If Batman thought there was a chance of getting out of this mess, and that he needed to protect his secret identity because of that, Virgil was going to hold onto his belief, too.

The mask freaked Sharon out. "I don't know what's worse," she often said, when she thought Batman was out of earshot, "seeing one of those zombies lurching up to the door, or turning around to see tall, dark, and spooky standing right there."

Zombies were worse. Virgil was sure.

"We're back," he said as he and Richie got to the bottom of the stairs and walked to what used to be Alva's private bar. "Any luck?"

"Some. Did you bring the agar?"

"Yeah." Richie held up the jar of powder. "We'll have to mix our own." He went to the tap, but Batman put out a gloved hand.

"You'll need purified, distilled water, and boil it to kill any microbes."

Richie opened his mouth, probably to say he knew that already, but Virgil shook his head. Bats wasn't in the mood. He'd been working on this problem twenty-two hours out of every day for the last week, and he'd only paused once, when Virgil and Richie had found what was left of Nightwing. Then he'd taken a long break somewhere they couldn't find him, and he'd come back, and he'd thrown himself into the work again.

"I've isolated the line," Batman said. "Virgil?" He indicated the microscope, and Virgil came over to peek. Biology wasn't his expertise, not the way math and the other sciences were, but he was too pleased to be asked for an opinion by Batman on something and he wasn't about to admit it.

Under the peering eye of the microscope they'd grabbed from the ruined high school two days ago, Virgil could make out cells. As he watched, two split, and he could see the two new cells were sick. They attached themselves to healthy blood cells on the slide.

"Now watch." Batman dropped something clear from a pipette onto the slide. Immediately the sick cells clumped and went dormant. The healthy cells stayed put.

"Is it a cure?" Virgil asked, scared to hope.

"This is my only zombie saliva sample. I'll need to collect more and test to make sure it's not just for this one specimen." His low voice caught, and for a moment, Virgil thought he knew whose body Batman had scraped his sample from. "Set up the agar jars. If this doesn't work, I've got some other ideas."

He left them there, in the emergency lights they'd set up for the makeshift lab. Virgil got to work boiling water for the agar. Richie snuck a peek into the microscope, and extended a probe from Backpack to take a closer look. "Huh."

"What?"

"Backpack says the solution is nitroglycerin-based."

"Great. So not only will we cure the zombies, we'll blow them up." Virgil grinned so when Richie turned to chide him for not knowing his chemistry, he could see it was a joke. Richie smiled back.

After they made the plates and set them to wait, they went up for dinner. Sharon's cooking hadn't been improved by zombie apocalypse, but she could heat a mean can of SpaghettiOs over a camp stove, and Virgil was bright enough to thank her. There were a dozen others trapped in the big house with them: two kids Virgil knew distantly from school, mostly people he didn't know. But they were bound together by necessity these days, and after dinner they all sat around like old friends, playing cards and board games to pass the time.

Outside the high gates, Virgil could sometimes hear the moans of the dead from far away. In here, they weren't safe, but they weren't in danger.

Virgil took a quiet moment to sit next to his sister. "While we were out, I went by the house."

She tensed up. "Don't risk yourself like that. There's nothing there more important than you being safe." It was the nicest thing she'd said to him, practically ever, and he felt even better about what he'd picked up. He handed her the bundle, wrapped in a plain white t-shirt. When she pulled away the fabric, she bit her lip at the old picture Virgil had found: the four of them together, Sharon wearing a yellow dress and missing her baby teeth up front, Virgil still an infant in their mother's arms. Pops had kept this photo in his room, and while the rest of the house was trashed, this had survived.

"Thanks," she said, and she didn't even insult him.

At sunset, Virgil and Richie went on patrol. Sharon always helped with their cover on this, saying they were out looking for food. Nobody stopped them; no one else wanted to go out into the city, and two healthy seventeen year old boys were safer than most.

"I don't like it," said Gear, as they cruised down a silent street. "Have you noticed the uptick in capes lately?" Dead capes, he meant. Live capes would be a blessing.

"I noticed." Just yesterday, they'd been forced to take down the shambling corpse of Green Arrow. Green Lantern, whom Virgil had admired as a mentor for years, was out there somewhere right now, no willpower to move his ring, but the same undead energy moving his steps. Virgil hadn't been able to make himself kill his hero, and they'd fled instead.

"Do you think they're sensing Batman? Or us?"

"Maybe." Virgil had his own ideas. See, the zombie virus had to come from somewhere. Alva wasn't the only one doing funny science in Dakota. A government lab had been built a few years back, and Batman said the real reason behind it had been to study the Bang Babies, and maybe replicate the effects of the Big Bang. Project Cadmus was officially cancelled, but that didn't mean the principles behind it weren't still on someone's mind.

And if the lab had built the zombie disease, didn't it make sense for the zombies to have an urge to come home?

"Three o'clock," Richie said in a low voice. Virgil turned to look, and his heart sunk again. Huntress might be undead, but there was no mistaking her costume. "We can take her."

"She's a combat expert."

"She was, you mean. Now she's undead and wants to eat us, V."

"Her and everyone else." He watched her stagger. Her skin fell off in flaps, like tissue paper revealing a congealed, pink underbelly. "Let's leave her."

Gear just shook his head, then fell to the ground as Hawkgirl smacked into him heavily. Gear shouted under her weight. Virgil hesitated for a moment, seeing the fresh bite mark on her arm, but she growled at them and her eyes were dead. She was a zombie, no matter how newly-formed.

As her teeth aimed for Gear's neck, Virgil threw his weight into her, knocking her off his best friend. They rolled, and part of him cried inside, this was Hawkgirl, she was his friend, too. She let out a low groan. Virgil aimed both fists full of electricity and placed them to either side of her head. A strong zap to the brain, it was as good as a bullet.

She stopped moving.

You bury the dead, Virgil knew. You didn't leave their bodies to rot in the street, or to be eaten by the other dead. But he hadn't been able to bury his Pops, and if they paused now to see her into the ground, there was a good chance they'd be beset by more zombies, and they'd have to kill more friends.

They left her and went directly back to the mansion. They could tell Batman tonight.

Virgil and Richie kept the first watch of the night, like they normally did, staying up until midnight as they took turns looking out the windows for any trouble, and occasionally patrolling the grounds. Quiet tonight, and Virgil wasn't ever going to be dumb enough again to say "Too quiet."

When they were relieved by the next shift, the pair staggered upstairs to the bedroom, one out of dozens in this place, that they shared.

Sharon thought they bunked together just like they'd used to have sleepovers at Virgil's (but rarely Richie's) house. She wasn't entirely wrong, but then she'd never paid much attention when Richie had slept over before. Tonight, Virgil was out of sorts, and Richie was just tired, so they settled for curling up together, Richie falling asleep fast while Virgil rested his head on Richie's shoulder, listening to the world.

Around three in the morning, he heard a noise. Careful not to wake Richie, he got out of bed and went to the window. A figure in a dark cape moved across the lawn: Batman coming back. Virgil wasn't getting back to sleep, so he brushed a kiss on Richie's forehead and pulled on his jeans and t-shirt before creeping down the luxurious staircase, the whole house shrouded in darkness.

Batman stood in the front hallway, not moving.

"Hey, Batman," he said as cheerfully as he could in a whisper. "We got the plates made. Did you have any luck ... "

The door was open. Behind him, in the darkness, Virgil could make out that the gates also hung ajar. "Hey, you really are getting tired. You left the gates open." He sent out a long tendril of energy to wrap around the metal bars. When it lit up the lawn, he saw the faces of the dead: Superman, Wonder Woman, even poor Robin.

The flash also lit up Batman's face, and the horrible wound where he'd been bitten.

Virgil fell back, gate forgotten, everything but the terror in front of him forgotten. "Richie!"

Richie was already on the stairs, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Behind him, a few doors opened at Virgil's shout.

Batman lurched towards him. Virgil threw out a blast of energy, which coursed over the Kevlar cape, sending bolts into Batman's ruined chin. Virgil screamed as he ran backwards. "Basement!" he shouted, and scrambled for the door, hearing Richie's feet behind him. The other refugees started screaming. He heard Sharon's voice among them as he slammed the basement door shut, he and Richie inside, the zombies and their prey outside.

Batman was out there. Superman was out there. The door didn't hold a chance, and the boys fell away from it even as Wonder Woman's decaying fist smashed through the wood.

"We're trapped," Richie said, even as Virgil ran for the formula. He could cure Batman, maybe, and he could stop the plague, oh God, Batman was a zombie. Fear spiked through him as he grabbed the chemical with one hand and shot Wonder Woman with an energy bolt with the other. The blast barely slowed her down. Batman had syringes here. One slipped through Virgil's fingers. He grabbed it and managed to load a dose into the bore.

He turned in time to see Wonder Woman bite down hard on Richie's arm. Richie's scream pierced through Virgil like a spear, the excruciating pain and horror in his shrill voice rending Richie's vocal cords.

His paralysis broke, and Virgil jammed the first dose into Wonder Woman, not even pausing as he pulled the needle out, loaded it fast, and meeting eyes with Richie, jabbed the second dose into his arm.

Richie was sobbing, his arm bloody. "It's not going to work, it's not going to work."

Virgil placed his hand on Richie's hair, tears streaming from his own face. "It has to." Beside them, Wonder Woman fell to the floor, her dead body convulsing.

At the top of the stairs, Superman and Batman began lurching down towards them. Virgil loaded the needle again, and missed Batman's neck as Superman lifted him with a stinking, ruined arm.

And the flaw in the plan presented itself to Virgil as he went to jab the needle into invulnerable skin.

It broke.

Screaming, crying, he belatedly realized what he should have done. He stuck the broken needle into his own arm, but the plunger jammed, and Superman batted it away.

Out of Virgil's peripheral vision, he saw Richie begin to convulse, and after that all he saw for the rest of his life was Batman's teeth.

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The End

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My three favorite words are, "I liked this."


End file.
